Minute for Murder

by Nicholas Blake

  “Am I supposed to read this?”

  “M’ph,” replied the Director, without turning round.

  Fortescue read through the letter with his usual deliberation. At last he said:

  “Ker-rikey! What a story! Stultz! Ker-rikey! You remember Charles Kennington, Nigel? This is from him.”

  “But he’s dead.

  “Not dead,” said Jimmy Lake, still staring out of the window. “Let Nigel read it.”

  The letter was on pink, perfumed sheets; the hand-writing—large, flowing and ornate—the same as that on the pink envelope which had given Nita Prince such a turn earlier in the morning. Nigel began to read.

  “My dear,

  “What quite impossible notepaper. The Germans really have wonderfully bad taste. Looted, of course. I mean I looted the paper from the Germans. I do adore the word ‘loot,’ don’t you?—so forthright and masculine, and altogether satisfying. Well, I’ve been in the Fatherland for quite a time. Such an un-solid people—when they’re not bawling, they’re boo-hooing. Boo-hooing like mad, just now. I’ve been doing one of my female impersonation turns, the upshot of which, after some very vulgar and Boys-Own-Paperish adventures in and around Hamburg, was that we caught Stultz. Yes, I tapped him on the shoulder with my own lily-white hand. Not a sympathetic type. Not at all my idea of the beautiful blonde Nordic he-man. In fact, I quite took against him from the start. I am told he did some most disobliging things in the concentration camps, but I can’t bear atrocity stories, so let us pass on. As I say, I tapped this unappealing Stultz on the shoulder, and I must have tapped him a tiny bit hard, for what did he do but disgorge his little pellet of This-Way-to-Valhalla—yes. spat it out, but literally spat it out, so startled he was. Which was a merciful dispensation for your little Charles, as I could not sustain the spectacle of someone dying of poison at my feet, though they do say cyanide is quick, as such things go. I am sorry to harrow you with sordid and grating details, I’m sure your life is quite full enough of them already. What I took up the pen to relate is that I shall be home as quick as quick. I’ve given this letter to a devastatingly charming Sergeant, who is just off on leave, and he’ll smuggle it out and post it in England. Little Charles will be following hotfoot. Expect to get back on the 20th. Ring me at Claridges then. I can’t wait to hear all your news. Love to Alice. And Nita, if she is still with you. And all the boys and girls.

  “Yours affectionately,

  “BERTHA BODENHEIM

  “(alias CHARLES KENNINGTON).”

  “And is he back?” asked Nigel, after perusing this remarkable letter.

  “Yes, I’ve just rung him up,” said the Director, still staring out of the window. “He’s coming along here to-morrow morning.”

  “We must have a party for him,” Harker Fortescue said. “Was it a put-up job when he was posted ‘Missing. Believed killed’?”

  “Presumably.” Jimmy turned round at last. His musing expression broke into a smile. “That letter! Oh, my aunt, that letter!” He began to laugh, silently shaking with laughter as his way was. He flung himself into the leather arm-chair, tears of laughter rolling down his face.

  CHAPTER II

  ACTION HERE

  “TA-TA, MR. STRANGEWAYS. Be good,” said Mrs. Smith, clanking out with her bucket and mop.

  Nigel opened the window and emptied his ash-tray on to the ledge which ran the length of the building at the level of the sixth floor. Below him, in the park, the tired and discoloured plane-trees were thrashing with a gusty wind that seemed to have been blowing all summer, flinging dust from the rubble of bombed houses in the Londoner’s eyes, exasperating the nerves rubbed raw by war-time danger and discomfort.

  It was on this ledge, the previous summer, that Merrion Squires had established his eyrie. When the flying-bomb attacks started, a special system of warning was set up in the Ministry. A prolonged note on the buzzer indicated that a clutch of the missiles was approaching this area of London. If any of them was then plotted to be heading for the Ministry, a series of short buzzes sounded. At this signal, the staff occupying the upper floors—particularly those on the south side of the building—had been instructed to make for the emergency staircase on the north side, and go three or four flights down. A few days of this procedure, with the short alarm buzzes sounding at irregular intervals throughout the day, and the Division piling themselves down the stairway once or twice every hour, played hell with the work. The bolder spirits took to remaining in their rooms unless the roar of the flying bomb came too near to be ignored.

  At this stage Merrion Squires had set up as an independent spotter.

  “I do like to be able to see what the doodlebugs are doing,” he said.

  Accordingly, when a general alarm sounded, he crawled out of his window and sat on the ledge, armed with binoculars and a police whistle. From this point of vantage he would rake the sky: if he judged a flying bomb to be approaching on a course which would take it directly over, or into, the Ministry, he blew his whistle. The Division soon found him to be a reliable prognosticator, and his whistle unofficially replaced the alarm buzzes as a signal to scamper for the staircase. Much working time was thus saved, and everyone was happy, Merrion Squires not least; everyone, that is, except the Establishments Division. This Division, which concerned itself with personnel and maintenance problems, took an unfavourable view of Squires’ activity. They paid official roof-spotters to give official warnings. Merrion Squires, on the other hand, they begged to point out, was receiving salary as a temporary Civil Servant (grade: Specialist) in the Art Work Unit of the Visual Propaganda Division; they begged to inform him, therefore, that should he continue with his supererogatory task, they might find it necessary to deduct from his salary an amount equivalent to the period (or periods) thus daily consumed by him in cessation from his official work in the capacity set out above.

  Merrion had instantly launched a spirited counter-attack. In a masterly minute to Establishments Division, he computed the total of man-hours saved per diem over an average week by his personal warning system, added to it—somewhat audaciously—the amount of man-hours lost by the official system over the first week of the attacks, and requested overtime payment to himself in respect of the total. Establishments Division, staggered by this unorthodox approach, had never quite succeeded in getting on to the offensive again. Indeed, a year later, minutes were still passing desultorily between the antagonists, although an absolute deadlock had long before been reached, and neither side had discovered a formula by which the impasse could be resolved.

  Looking out over the park, Nigel could see the mark of the bomb which had put an end to Merrion’s ledge-spotting. Not more than 150 yards away, there was a patch of splintered and withered trees. Here one of the last flying bombs to come over London had exploded. They had all heard the distant, gathering roar; heard Merrion’s whistle, sounding more urgently than ever before; dashed for the staircase and tumbled down it pell-mell. Then a quivering silence. The bomb had cut out. Then a winged swishing, as if Satan was falling out of heaven. Then a paralysing blast; another instant of silence, followed by the tinkle of glass, lazily cascading.

  When they got back to the sixth floor, they found Merrion Squires lying insensible and covered with blood in his room. His door had been blown off its hinges into the passage; the wall was riddled with daggers of glass; the floor looked like a refuse-tip; and Merrion’s whistle was still firmly clutched in his hand.

  On resuming consciousness, his first shaky words had been, “Establishments Division shall hear of this.”

  It transpired that he had still been sitting on the ledge when the bomb struck, and its blast had blown him back into his room.

  “Why on earth didn’t you take cover, you silly gubbins?” Jimmy Lake asked.

  “What cover?” replied Merrion, in his indolent Irish drawl.

  Afterwards, he confided to Nigel that he had been too frightened to move.

  “There was I, your little cherub sitting up
aloft. And there was that murderous great thing sailing straight down at me. And first I thought I’d wait a second or two longer to see if it wouldn’t turn away: and then I thought, well, me boy, it’s too late to get back into yer room now—and anyway what’s the use? It had me hypnotised. And,” he added, “if Ingle sends me in one more caption to mark up, about our gallant fighters of the home front staring death in the face, I’ll kill him. I mean it, Nigel, I’ll do in the little cliché-monger. Me nerves won’t stand it.”

  Nigel closed the window and went back to his desk, ruminating on the bizarre exposures of war. A bomb tore away the side of a house and revealed a vertical series of lavatory bowls hanging on the edge of an abyss. It tore away the façade of a human being, and you got a view of the psychological plumbing: but only for a moment; the wall was soon up again, the interior tidied. Tidied, but the structure warped, perhaps dangerously and invisibly weakened. Or sometimes, for all one knew, strengthened. If you found you had stood up to the ordeal, the discovery gave self-confidence. That, no doubt, as one could learn from primitive tribes, is what ordeals are for.

  From Merrion Squires, Nigel’s mind strayed to that other and more improbable hero, Charles Kennington. It was pleasant to reflect how many of his sort the war had thrown up. The long-haired, sensitive types, who had voted at the Oxford Union that under no circumstances would they die for King and Country, and a few years later had gone up into the air with the professionals of the R.A.F. and helped to win the Battle of Britain, fighting with the same skill and abandon as once they had speechified. The conscientious objectors, who refused to kill but performed prodigies of valour during the blitzes as members of Rescue Squads and Fire Brigades. The clever little dons, who vanished one day from their universities and were next heard of having dropped by parachute into occupied territory, organising the Resistance, dynamiting bridges, standing up to a firing-party in a squalid backyard. The anonymous-looking scientists, who walked up to unexploded bombs and coldly took them to pieces, as though they were demonstrating an experiment in a laboratory, and generally were not blown to pieces. All the eccentrics, the amateurs, the people who did not believe in war and went into a cold fury when it interfered with their private lives, and were then extremely dangerous to anything that got in their light, whether it was a German or a piece of red tape. The people who proved so much the more disconcerting to the enemy because they did not wear their toughness on their sleeve, and because their minds would keep jumping the rails so earnestly laid down for them by Teutonic students of the English character. It was the streak of fantasy in it that gave this character its charm, and also gave it the unpredictability so formidable to a logical foe, Nigel reflected.

  Charles Kennington was a fair representative. A young man of engaging though effeminate appearance, he had been a society photographer before the war. His clientèle, whom he bullied and insulted in a way they all agreed was devastatingly chic, would simply not have believed that, when he disappeared from their ken for a fortnight every summer, it was to attend a Territorial Army camp.

  In September, 1939, he disappeared for quite a bit longer, to turn up again in his old haunts, after Dunkirk, with his arm in a sling, and a Military Cross on his tunic. He had, in fact, been more severely wounded and more outstandingly brave than either of these decorations indicated. Jimmy Lake, who was his brother-in-law, approached the War Office and got him seconded to the Ministry of Morale as one of the Military Censors. It was then that Nigel had first met him, for Kennington dealt with the censorship of photographic material and was therefore in constant touch with Nigel’s Division. Charles Kennington had, indeed, contributed a good deal to the character of the Division, Nigel realised now—its flavour of gaiety, insouciance, unorthodoxy. From the start, he had been a problem to the Permanent Civil Servants in the Ministry, through his habit of dating minutes by the liturgical calendar of the Church of England. Edgar Billson, who was Senior Officer in the Photographs Library, and managed its financial affairs, was particularly harassed by this idiosyncrasy. On receiving a minute headed “Third Day before the Feast of St. Petronella, Virgin and Martyr,” he had made a démarche in person, only to be met by the shocked remonstrance from Charles Kennington, “But, my dear, are you not a Christian?”

  A year later Kennington had a Medical Board and returned to active service. Jimmy Lake heard from him at long intervals, until the day when he was posted as “Missing, Believed Killed,” during the fighting on the Rhine. And now he had popped up again, having by his own account captured Stultz, the number three Nazi leader whom the Allies had been hunting for two months. It was all very satisfactorily in the English tradition, thought Nigel: all very satisfactory, except for Nita Prince, who had evidently not been too well pleased by a message from the dead.

  The door opened. “What’s this?” asked Merrion Squires disgustedly. “Thinking again?”

  “Yes, I was thinking,” said Nigel, removing his feet from the chair on which they rested, and pushing it towards his visitor. “I was thinking about Charles Kennington as a matter of fact. And yourself.”

  “Sweet of you. What’s the connection? I never met him. Before my time.”

  “Eccentricity. Queerness. The fantasy-strain in the English character.”

  “If you’re suggesting that I’m either an Englishman or a queer——” Merrion Squires exploded angrily, his long clown’s face resting on the back of the chair, which he sat astride like a child playing at horses.

  “Oh, no. You’re just a West Britisher with an artistic temperament.”

  This double-barrelled insult failed to get the usual response from Squires.

  “I say, talking of temperament, what’s up with Our Blonde?”

  “You tell me, then.”

  “Did y’ever see that girl in a flutter before? Y’didn’t. Because she’s not the sort that flutters. She just stays, all serene, like a damned great carnivorous orchid with its mouth wide open, and you all queue up to fly into it.”

  “I don’t think much of your botany.”

  “Damn my botany!” snapped Merrion. “I know about women, I tell you. Well, I had to go and see Jimmy yesterday evening, and just as I was outside the door, I heard her say, ‘It’s too late to back out now. You can’t do it. Everyone knows, or guesses. There’s no use trying to pretend you’re not in love with me.’ At that point I barged in. Our Director and Our Blonde were in the state of having been contiguous. Jimmy was cool enough, I must say. You know, staring out of the window, hands in pockets. ‘Well, Merrion, what do you want?’—the usual act. But Nita”—a note of relish crept into Squires’ voice—“Nita was in a taking. Positively flushed, positively trembling, just as if she was a real woman. So Jimmy and I got down to work. And Nita started on her typewriter. Believe it or not, my boy, she had to tear up two drafts of what she was typing. Did y’ever know that girl make a mistake before? Y’didn’t. Well, then?”

  “I suppose she’s a bit fussed about Charles Kennington coming back,” said Nigel slowly. “They say she was engaged to him while he was here.”

  Merrion Squires snapped his fingers dramatically. “Y’ve got it! I didn’t know about that. She’s afraid Kennington will find out about her and Jimmy. That’s why she said it was no use his pretending not to be in love with her: Kennington’d be bound to hear about it sooner or later, since it’s an open secret here. Well, if this doesn’t beat the band!”

  “And why are you so hellishly pleased, may I ask?”

  Merrion Squires gave Nigel one of his glancing looks, half impish, half furtive.

  “Oh, I like to see orchids being ruffled. Nothing personal, y’know. Just an abstract love of justice. Now that explains something else,” he pursued. “When we’d finished our work, Jimmy showed me Kennington’s letter, and told me he expected him along this morning; asked me to pop in at coffee-time if I’d like to meet him: half the Division going to be there apparently: see the conquering hero come stuff: wonder if Jimmy’s hired a brass band—m
ightn’t go down well with Establishments. Well, the Blonde gave him a look and said she thought Kennington would hate a fuss to be made of him, and she herself proposed to take a half-day off. And Jimmy—you know how suave and patient his voice sounds when he’s up against tough opposition—Jimmy just said he couldn’t let her off this morning, he’s got a conference at midday she must steno, and anyway didn’t she want to see Exhibit Number One.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This fella Kennington is apparently bringing along a phial of poison he took off the Nazi fella. Just to titivate our ghoulish curiosity. But, don’t you see, Nita is afraid of Kennington seeing her with Jimmy at all, even in a crowd: afraid their faces will give them away.”

  “What an unwholesome imagination you have, to be sure,” said Nigel. “I’ve never heard such a farrago of guesswork. Why on earth should Nita be so upset? Kennington was supposed to be dead. She’d a perfect right to take up with——”

  “Oh, you’re hopeless. The fact is that Nita is upset—she’s more than upset, she’s frantic. And if you have a better theory——”

  What better theory Nigel might have produced was forestalled by a knock at the door. They both groaned. Edgar Billson was the only person in the Division who ever knocked on a door before entering.

  Edgar Billson crossed the room, as usual, in an unwelcoming silence, the toes in the elastic-sided boots pointing outwards, his eyes fixed upon the floor as if he could not recognise Nigel’s existence till he had come within the official orbit of his desk. Having made the regulation approach, he looked up.

  “Good-morning, Strangeways.”

  “Good-morning.”

  “I have a complaint to make. But perhaps you are busy?” Billson’s watery eyes swam half-way towards Merrion Squires, then turned back.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Do sit down, won’t you?” Then, as his visitor looked stiffly around, markedly ignoring the chair on which Merrion Squires still sat astride, Nigel added, “Take Miss Finlay’s.”